I Didn't Do It for You (34 page)

What appears to the individual as admirable clarity of thought can seem to the outsider dangerous simplification, a vision stripped of the messy contradictions that mean a situation is rarely as straightforward as it first appears. Isolation allowed the Fighters to hone a steely resolve that enabled them to achieve the seemingly impossible. But if the hermit's life shields you from temptation, it can also stunt your intellectual growth. Rejecting capitalism, with all its vices, came easily to those who had never been exposed to its virtues. ‘Had I known about all of this,' exclaimed a high-ranking veteran of the Struggle, absorbing the bustle of a Western city on his first visit to London, ‘I would never have fought so long in the bush.' Insulated from Africa's contemporary reality, it was easy for the Eritreans to make the mistake of assuming they knew all the answers. The awareness of how poorly the colonialists and superpowers had behaved, the bitterness of seeing their natural ally opt for Ethiopia, the knowledge of the continent's casual indifference: it all encouraged the belief that the Movement had nothing to learn from its critics, whether black or white. Like every rejected minority before it, the EPLF convinced itself its very solitude was proof of moral
superiority. ‘We are certain' was more than just the name of a punishingly steep mountainside, it was the Movement's unstated leitmotif. A leitmotif that hardened like rock during the Nakfa years.

At what point does such purity of purpose cross the line into oppressive authoritarianism? Even those who today pine for a lost golden age acknowledge that individualism was not a quality valued by the EPLF. This was a military organization, after all, and true democracy, with its tolerance of mavericks and loudmouths, is not suited to waging war. At daily meetings, Fighters would publicly pick over each other's revolutionary failings, ‘self-criticism' was strongly encouraged. ‘There were spies in the Movement who would befriend you, listen to your ideas, pretend to sympathize with your complaints and then, during a meeting, denounce you as “petit-bourgeois” or accuse you of being a “regionalist”,' remembers an ex-Fighter. ‘People who had taken degrees were made to apologize to the peasantry for their education and privileges.' Such obligatory abnegation fitted in well with the Eritrean national character, the tendency, developed through decades of colonial occupation, to sit in impenetrable silence, accept authority–at least on the surface–and keep one's thoughts to oneself. ‘A lot of people thought it was bullshit. The EPLF had been set up by “petit bourgeois” people, after all, most of the leaders had been students at Addis University. But we were taught that the whole world would soon become socialist, so it was up to you to adapt. You learnt to say the right things, keep a low profile and play the game. I went along with it, because I had joined to free my country, and this seemed a price worth paying. But there were some who couldn't stand it, and they deliberately martyred themselves in battle.'

This was the dark side of all the dogged determination, but it was a darkness visiting Westerners were reluctant to
recognize. ‘At the time one was just swept away by the hard work and efficiency and self-sacrifice of it all. But looking back, you do wonder if there wasn't something rather disturbing about a movement that exercised that level of control,' says Trish Silkin, who visited the front as an anthropologist and aid worker in the 1970s. Dissent, especially dissent that crystallized into direct challenges to Isaias' burgeoning control, was ruthlessly smothered. Even today, ex-Fighters close down whenever the question arises of what happened to the ringleaders of these internal challenges, made to ‘disappear' with typical Eritrean quietness.

Once, on the long trip back from Nakfa, I got to exchanging metaphors with two former Fighters. Our banter was prompted by what is popularly known as the Heart of Tigray, an infamous stretch of road between Keren and Asmara. The nausea-inducing road, as twisted and torturous–so the proverb goes–as the hearts of Eritrea's treacherous neighbours in Ethiopian Tigray, winds its way through bulbous rock formations and the giant candelabra of euphorbia cactus. ‘So, if there was a road that symbolized the Eritrean heart, how would it be?' I teased. ‘Absolutely straight,' came the cheerful chorus. ‘What do
you
think?' ‘I think it would be dark, hidden, and very mysterious.'

Yet perhaps Nakfa's most dangerous legacy was not the EPLF's indomitable self-belief, its profound distrust of outsiders or its iron control, but the impossibly high expectations raised in a generation of Eritreans.

During their lessons in the trenches, EPLF ideologues conjured up a vision of Free Eritrea, a prosperous land in which farmers tilled fertile fields, fishermen trawled teeming waters and industrialists tapped long-neglected deposits of gold, potash–even, perhaps, oil. If Eritrea was barren and
denuded, they taught their classes, it was only because its forests had been systematically stripped by first Italian developers and then the marauding Ethiopian army. Independent Eritrea would blossom anew. Saplings would be planted, rivers dammed, terraces built. Gazing across what resembled the surface of an asteroid, the Fighters dreamt, like the dying Falstaff, of lush pastures and green bowers, where knobbly trees of uncertain age cast their cool shade. It was a landscape, they came to believe, that had been stolen from them–just like everything else.

That glowing dream of paradise is still captured today in the most everyday of items, all the more poignant for their functional banality. Walk into any Eritrean roadside restaurant, where Christmas tinsel serves as year-round decoration, and you will find yourself sitting at a table decorated with grape clusters and shiny red apples, tumbling alpine torrents and dewy lawns. Perhaps these made-in-Taiwan wax tablecloths are simply the cheapest things on the market. But, like the glossy calendars on the walls, like the murals lovingly painted on the walls of Eritrea's coffee bars–all green glades, quiet pools and rolling meadows–they express Eritrea's vision of Heaven, its Elysian Fields.

I only registered the Utopian quality of that vision one day in a library in Rome. Leafing through some old Italian encyclopedias, I came across photographs of late 19th-century Eritrea, taken before the saw mills and napalm had done their worst. The black-and-white photographs certainly showed thicker tree cover than I was used to seeing. But this was nothing like the green haven lovingly described by my Eritrean friends. Even before the colonial depredations, before the Ethiopian army had got to work, much of the country, it was clear, had already been a dry scrubland of punishing harshness. The realization
came as a shock to me. How much more of a shock would it prove for the thousands of Fighters who risked their lives fighting for a land of lost content, a country that had, it seemed, existed largely in their imaginations?

In Eritrea, history always comes tightly compressed, physical evidence of just how many turbulent, world-shaking events have been squeezed into a few narrow centuries. To the west of Asmara, the gates of the 19th-century Italian cemetery which holds the bones of Martini's settlers virtually rub shoulders with the walls of Kagnew Station. And just behind Kagnew stretches a large patch of wasteland which stands as testimony to the last, most lavishly destructive, phase of superpower involvement in the Horn of Africa.

Locals call these abandoned acres ‘Tank Graveyard' and at first glance this looks like the scene of some apocalyptic clash, a giant confrontation into which every weapon known to 20th-century military technology was successively hurled. Upturned green jeeps lie on their backs, displaying their axles to the skies as shamelessly as a drunk old woman exposing her knickers. Scores of armoured personnel carriers crouch like brown crabs in the weeds, white butterflies fluttering through their blank view holes. Tanks and cranes, amphibious vehicles
and anti-aircraft guns, petrol tankers and mortar launchers–even the odd fighter plane–all lie tumbled in a mess of rusting metal. But, for the most part, the Tank Graveyard holds the remains of hundreds of heavy duty trucks, the basic working tool of any army. Crumpled by explosions, dented by impacts, they have been stacked like airline dinners, five-deep to save space. The highlands wind thrums through the towers built from their twisted chassis, while brown kites shrill their cool, haunting lament from an impossibly blue sky.

The Tank Graveyard is not, as one guidebook to Eritrea claims, a spillover from Kagnew Station. Most of the machinery here is of Soviet make, not American. As the war in Eritrea escalated, and the number of disabled trucks, tanks and personnel carriers littering the province rose, the Derg dragged the damaged hardware donated by its Soviet friends here for dumping. At best, the carcasses could be tinkered with and sent back into battle, although, to be honest, Ethiopian technicians never proved particularly adept at repairs. At the very least, depositing them here would keep them out of the hands of the guerrillas, who were quick to teach themselves the operating principles of captured machinery and then turn it on its former owners. When the Struggle ended, the EPLF completed what its enemy had begun, removing the debris that was cluttering Eritrea's scarce agricultural land.

It is easy to miss when confronted with so many thousands of metal corpses, but the Tank Graveyard has been quietly shrinking as the years go by. Unable to afford the price being asked on the international arms market for new tanks, Eritrea's armed forces have been resurrecting the classics, tapping the pile for old T54s, T55s and T62s. Underneath the brown layer of rust, the thick metal carapaces hold true. The simple Soviet mechanical systems have weathered the passage of time with an ease no state-of-the-art weapons system could match. In three weeks,
the 50-year-old Soviet models can be refitted, ready once again to fend off the latest threat from Ethiopia. ‘New clothes are obviously better than old clothes. But if you don't buy new, you use the old. This is not just scrap, it's our stock,' says Colonel Woldu Ghebreyesus, the former EPLF Fighter who now heads the army's tank department. He's an unabashed aficionado. ‘I've been using these captured tanks for the last 30 years and I've come to really appreciate Soviet technology. I have no criticisms at all.'
¹

The fresh uses to which the contents of Tank Graveyard are still being put underline the bleak message of this stretch of wasteland. Here sits a monument to military oversupply, testimony to excess. Generous to a fault when it came to military hardware, the Soviet Union was to end up sending enough weaponry to the Horn of Africa for not one, not two, but five separate conflicts: Somalia's war on Ethiopia, Ethiopia's war on Somalia, the Derg's battle against the Eritrean rebels, the Eritreans' campaign–using stolen machinery–against the Derg and, finally, most recently, independent Eritrea's two-year border war with Ethiopia. ‘Of course, now it is possible to say it was too much,' reluctantly acknowledges Sergei Sinitsyn, who served at the Soviet embassy in Addis in the 1950s and 1970s. ‘But in time of war you are swept away by immediate needs and requests. In any case,' he adds, almost as an afterthought, ‘if it had not been us supplying, it would have been the Americans.'
²

Most countries in Africa have been traumatized by the dance of the Cold War, that brutally simplistic era in which what mattered, for any African nation hoping to be picked as partner by a superpower, was never good government, financial transparency or enlightened agricultural reform, but whether the leadership concerned chose to mouth the platitudes of Communist orthodoxy or free-market capitalism–each, in its
own way, equally out of step with African reality. What made the Horn unique, and left it uniquely damaged, was that midway through the Cold War tango, the two dancing couples–Somalia and the Soviet Union in one corner, Ethiopia and the United States in the other–separated, strode past each other on the ballroom floor, and swapped partners. The fact that such a swap could take place at all exposed the moral vacuity of the pairings. But it also had terrible implications for the nations concerned, where the military stakes were ratcheted to ever giddier heights. During the years in which Washington funded Haile Selassie's military expansion programme, the Soviets dispatched up to $1 billion
³
in weapons and military know-how to Somalia's President Siad Barre, desperate to keep pace with his neighbour. When Moscow suddenly became Ethiopia's new best friend in the late 1970s, its military advisers, ejected by the furious Siad Barre, found themselves facing black Africa's fourth most heavily-armed state–the state they themselves had equipped. There could only be one answer: yet more arms deliveries, aimed at neutralizing the impact of Moscow's previous largesse. The Soviet Union almost fell over itself in its determination to make up for its strategic gaffe. For three months between 1977 and 1978, 225 Soviet transport planes–15 per cent of Moscow's air force–ferried 60,000 tonnes of hardware to Ethiopia for the war over the Ogaden, one aircraft landing every 20 minutes.
⁴
The Eritrean front, former EPLF commanders estimate, was destined to receive 800–1,000 tanks, 2–3,000 trucks and an untold number of machine guns, heavy artillery, mortars and the multiple rocket launchers known as ‘Stalin's organs'. By the end of its 14-year relationship with the Derg, Moscow had poured nearly $9 billion in military hardware into Ethiopia, working out, at the roughest of estimates, at over $5,400 in weaponry for every Ethiopian man, woman and child.
⁵
For a developing African
nation experiencing one superpower-funded arms race might be regarded as bad enough. Two really verged on the excessive.

Today, many former Soviet policymakers have the grace to feel embarrassed about this deadly double crescendo. ‘It was our usual trouble,' ruminates Vladimir Shubin, deputy director of the dilapidated Institute for African Studies in Moscow. ‘Whether it is building a hospital or a conference hall, we always tend to do things big, too big.'
⁶
But like their American counterparts, they still view the Cold War era from what, to the outsider, seems a bizarrely skewed angle. Superpower manipulation? What superpower manipulation? To hear this disingenuous generation of Moscow insiders tell it, the behemoth that saturated the Horn in weaponry was never more than a submissive junior partner in its African relationships, responding to, while never dictating, moves made by unreliable domestic leaders. It was all Siad Barre's fault. He had taken advantage of Soviet naivety, a naivety so deep the Soviets convinced themselves briefly after the Derg veered left that a Marxist Somalia, Marxist Ethiopia and Marxist South Yemen might bury their differences to form a federation of like-minded African states. ‘The Somalis fooled us,' says Sinitsyn. ‘Siad Barre had promised our ambassador, just a few days before he invaded the Ogaden, that no Somali soldier would ever cross the border. We were interested in both countries, Ethiopia and Somalia. Then the Somalis invaded, and we found ourselves squeezed between two friends. When we decided to come to Ethiopia's support, it was on moral grounds. Ethiopia had been the victim of an act of sheer aggression by a country we supported. We simply had to act.'

It is hard to credit that strategic self-interest counted for quite so little in Moscow's volte-face. With a population 10 times larger than Somalia's, conveniently-positioned Eritrean ports–closer to the Middle East than Somalia's harbours–its
role as OAU headquarters and its history as a symbol of the anti-colonial struggle, Ethiopia was always going to be partner of choice for a superpower seeking leverage in the Horn. And the timing for a bold Soviet grab at greater world influence felt right. Defeat in Vietnam had left Washington on the back foot, nervous about intervention abroad, unsure of its place in the world. The sudden collapse of Portugal's African empire had given birth to an independent Angola and Mozambique, led by Marxist governments that looked to the Soviet Union for philosophical guidance and financial help. From Tanzania to Madagascar, Benin to Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana to Algeria, radical African presidents were nationalizing industries and declaring single-party rule. The continent was on the turn, ‘progressive' forces appeared to be triumphing. For a superpower pushing against what felt like limp US resistance, in search of berths for its submarines and landing strips for its aircraft, Ethiopia was a prize to be coveted.

In justifying its U-turn to itself, Moscow could also dwell upon the emotional thread that had linked it to Ethiopia through the centuries. This was the one African country with which Russia could boast a long-standing historical connection. As far back as Peter the Great, the Tsars had fantasized about an alliance with Africa's Christian kingdom, land of Prester John. In 1888, a foolhardy Cossack adventurer had actually set up a short-lived colony baptized ‘New Moscow' on the Red Sea. During the 19th-century colonial scramble for Africa, Russian emissaries to the Abyssinian royal court had vied with Italian, British and French delegations for Emperor Menelik II's attention. It is even said that Russian military tactics–urged on Menelik by an enterprising Russian captain–played a role in the victory at Adua. Surveying Ethiopia, with its peasant population mired in feudal poverty, its powerful Orthodox church, its decadent aristocracy and restless students, Moscow
felt it was looking at a black version of its younger self. This was an African Russia, before Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had got to work, screaming out for change. It was true that Moscow's new friendship was being forged just as the settling of scores in Addis Ababa reached its bloodiest. ‘You would meet an acting governor or a major one day and the next day you would be told “they are no more”,' remembers Shubin, who toured Ethiopia in October 1977. ‘They were dying one by one.' But the grim reality of the Red Terror merely seemed to confirm the correctness of the parallels being drawn by Soviet analysts. During their revolutions, Russia and France had both experienced such purges, an inevitable part of history's working, it was felt. However unappetizing events in the capital seemed, they had no doubt that Ethiopia was embarking on a fundamental process of structural change. ‘These were scuffles at the top. Whatever was going on in Addis, a real revolution was taking place in the countryside, where the land was being nationalized. You could feel it,' insists Shubin.

In the eyes of such men, Moscow was under an active obligation to intervene. Marx had taught his acolytes certain things were destined to pass. Lo and behold, in Ethiopia, his predictions about the rise of the proletariat appeared to be coming true. How could Moscow, keeper of Marx's sacred flame, turn a deaf ear when a socialist new-born asked for help?

‘It's difficult to understand now, but at the time many Soviets really believed that the battle between capitalism and socialism was inevitable, unavoidable and, in the final instance, destined to be won by socialism. Going against it would have been like trying to go against the tide of history,' says Anatoly Adamishin, deputy foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev. ‘Do you know the joke about the husband who decides to murder his wife by screwing her to death? After weeks of constant love-making, she is looking very sprightly, while he is in a
wheelchair, utterly exhausted. “Poor thing,” he whispers to a friend. “She doesn't realize she has only days to live.” We were like that when it came to capitalism. “Poor thing,” we kept telling ourselves. “It doesn't realize it's doomed.”' He gives a rueful laugh. ‘We entered Ethiopia step by step, in stupidity, but we had this conception we were fulfilling an international duty to help people struggling against oppression.'
⁷

It was clear that socialism's eventual success, in a country as accustomed to one-man rule as Ethiopia, rested on the shoulders of one individual: the man baptized ‘the Red Negus' by the media. Soviet diplomats who met Mengistu when he was still a major jostling for position in the Derg–a period during which he claimed to have survived nine assassination attempts–were favoured with what, in tribute to the Soviet Union's most famous astronaut, was known as a ‘Gagarin smile': the beaming welcome of a man who appeared to have a limpid conscience and nothing to hide. They noted the charisma, but were not fooled by the impression of sunny openness. ‘Mengistu was a very broad smile, with a very hard man behind,' remembers Sinitsyn, who first met him at a 1974 rally. ‘He struck me as a man who had grasped his purpose in life, who knew exactly where he stood. He was very resolute, capable of taking difficult decisions. A man who, as the Americans say, would draw first.'

Mengistu's ruthlessness was built on profound insecurity. In contrast with Haile Selassie, an Amhara aristocrat whose self-belief was reinforced every time he looked in the mirror and registered his own aquiline profile and pale complexion, evidence of that prized Solomonic heritage, Mengistu had grown up nursing a clutch of inferiority complexes, grievances too deep ever to be assuaged. While he towered over the tiny Emperor–not a difficult feat–he was nonetheless acutely aware of his own lack of stature. Soviet advisers chuckled
amongst themselves at his built-up shoes, his insistence on being photographed in splendid isolation. (‘If you look at the official photos, you'll see Mengistu never allowed himself to be photographed standing next to anyone. He didn't like the comparison,' one former military adviser told me.) They laughed at the way in which an Ethiopian master of ceremonies always arranged for official handshakes to be staged above a table bearing a huge flower bowl, ensuring the resulting photo showed the visitor bowed and at full stretch. ‘He was a very small man, small physically and small morally,' sniffs Adamishin.